On Saturday, President George Bush bowed to pressure from the bipartisan 9/11 commission and released the classified intelligence memo he received a month before the terrorist attacks. This came after Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, testified before the commission on Thursday.

The US press, including the Christian Science Monitor, welcomed the "unusual, but necessary step. Given the spike in terrorist 'chatter' that summer, and the scale of attack that followed, the public has a right to know what was being communicated to its commander in chief."

The press agreed that the one-page memo, entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack the US", was no smoking gun. Al-Qaida had attacked US interests before September 11, said the New York Post's John Podhoretz, "but attacks using aircraft on the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and wherever Flight 93 was heading - all in the same morning? Nobody could have imagined that. And nobody did. And nobody is at fault."

Mr Bush could not be blamed, agreed the New York Times. "But that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them." The paper conceded that even a "prescient" response after the August 2001 memo "would have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should still haunt the president as they haunt the nation."

For the New York Sun, the current controversy was "ridiculous in a classically inside-Washington way". It bemoaned both the Republicans for trying to keep something that contained little new information classified, and the Democrats for portraying the memo as evidence that Mr Bush "knew" the attacks were on there way yet failed to prevent them.

"The danger in all this, is that it detracts from the job at hand, which is to marshal the political and military force to carry this fight to the enemy in Iraq and other lands where terrorists are swarming," said the paper.

Across the Atlantic, the Independent reckoned "the harm of the declassified memo is not that it warned of an imminent attack, but that it confirms now how much US agencies knew of the risk, and how little the president and his top security aide took notice."